YALSA’s Teen Book Finder User Reviews

YALSA’s Teen Book Finder
YALSA’s Teen Book Finder
American Library Association

Top reviews

Good books at my fingertips!

I love that I have good books at my fingertips, but it seems it’s not being updated any longer. The Printz award list hasn’t been updated in a few years. YALSA, this is THE way to keep teens engaged in reading! Please update this with new titles!

Rip off

This is not what I thought it would have been I thought I would
have been able to read books but I cannot this just really shows
ware you can buy some

Updated one year ago

Since all the other reviews are older than one year I thought I would try this app out and review it. The only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars was I was surprised at how many books were missing from popular authors. Brandon Sanderson only had two books listed when his Mistborn and other series are very popular for instance.
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About the App

It would be great if you could put more hot picks in display and new books in display.
It would be great if once that you locate the library it could give you a link to place a hold or the phone number to call the library directly and place a hold. I tried to call to the phone that you provide and even though there's a path to call to Reston Regional Library, the path is long and a teenager wouldn't invest this effort. I insist it would be such a great service just to link the library's location with the phone number.
There's a lot of Library systems around the country but, why not?
Thank you from an avid reader from Fairfax County.
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So

This game will not do anything

Alphabetical order please

Why is a site associated with The American Library Association listing its authors by their FIRST names? Alphabetical order of people is by last name, first.

Crap!

This app is junk. Plain and simple. NONE of the books I want are on there! They're not too well known books but so what!?!?! This app should have them in its database! This app doesn't even recognize two amazing books, one a classic entertainment, Ragweed and the other a great series, the original Percy Jackson series and the dumb thing doesn't even have THAT!!!???!!!!
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Good

Works well for when I'm looking for a new book to read. The app is simple, but I like that.

Disappointing

The most useful aspect of this app is the book lists, which seems to have been the intention. However because the book database is limited to the books on the list, it's not very functional for finding a new book to read. The "locate book" option only shows results for southern Indiana--a place I've never been--and there nowhere I can find to change that.

Ultimately I don't know how to use this app in a way that a quick google search doesn't offer.
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Good idea, clunky implementation

So, I love the YALSA lists online. They are top-notch and a great place to go to find titles for my 9th grade classroom library. Actually, they're the best place I've found. And all the books are in this app, I suppose, but... a lot of buts. A few of the screens are missing "back" buttons, so once you get there you're kind of trapped and have to start over instead of just going back and searching for more "sci fi" titles or whatever.
I wish the reviews or synopses were a bit more substantial—there's all this app infrastructure but then not all that much that actually tells you about the actual titles once you find them.
And the searching—yikes! Authors names are actually NOT IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER. First, they seem like they're sorted by first name, but then you look closely and realize all the first names are L's, for example, but after that the names jump all around. Bizarre. The first time I tried searching by author, I was looking for other books by the same author of a book I'd just found through the app. When I finally found her name (not in alphabetical order), it said "NO TITLES LISTED." And I had just looked at a book by her in the app! (Lish McBride/"Hold Me Closer, Necromancer" if any folks who work on the app are reading).
So as a result, I fear this may not be a reliable way to locate books for kids as I'd hoped. If this worked the way it should, it'd be awesome!
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Alternatives to YALSA’s Teen Book Finder